insisting that the same consensus proved the existence of daemons, of
witchcraft, of divination, and when they combined with the Platonic
school, of more dangerous elements still.
I take the Stoics and Epicureans as the two most radical schools. On the
whole both of them fought steadily and strongly against the growth of
superstition, or, if you like to put it in other language, against the
dumb demands of man's infra-rational nature. The glory of the Stoics is
to have built up a religion of extraordinary nobleness; the glory of the
Epicureans is to have upheld an ideal of sanity and humanity stark
upright amid a reeling world, and, like the old Spartans, never to have
yielded one inch of ground to the common foe.
The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be
enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular
set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions
always at hand; and the mind that desires such things--that is, the mind
that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and
honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill
itself with their relations.
* * * * *
Let us first consider the result of the mere denial of the Olympian
religion. The essential postulate of that religion was that the world is
governed by a number of definite personal gods, possessed of a human
sense of justice and fairness and capable of being influenced by normal
human motives. In general, they helped the good and punished the bad,
though doubtless they tended too much to regard as good those who paid
them proper attention and as bad those who did not.
Speaking broadly, what was left when this conception proved inadequate?
If it was not these personal gods who made things happen, what was it?
If the Tower of Siloam was not deliberately thrown down by the gods so
as to kill and hurt a carefully collected number of wicked people, while
letting the good escape, what was the explanation of its falling? The
answer is obvious, but it can be put in two ways. You can either say:
'It was just chance that the Tower fell at that particular moment when
So-and-so was under it.' Or you can say, with rather more reflection but
not any more common sense: 'It fell because of a definite chain of
causes, a certain degree of progressive decay in the building, a certain
definite pressure, &c. It was bound to fall.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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